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September 1, 1939 — 8 Comments

  1. “Why did Auden dislike his own poem?”
    Thank you for addressing this comment, and addressing it well. It’s the comment I searched those following in hopes of a reply. And thank you for all the things you do, including handling American Digest.

  2. Richard Wilbur thought Auden was pretty good too. Here’s his poem “For W. H. Auden”:

    Now I am surer where they were going.
    The brakie loping the tops of the moving freight,
    The beautiful girls in their outboard, waving to someone
    As the stern dug in and the wake pleated the water.

    The uniformed children led by a nun
    Through the terminal’s uproar, the clew-drawn scholar descending
    The cast-iron stair of the stacks, shuffling his papers,
    The Indians, two to a blanket, passing in darkness,

    Also the German prisoner switching
    His dusty neck as the truck backfired and started—
    Of all these noted in stride and detained in memory
    I now know better that they were going to die,

    Since you, who sustained the civil tongue
    In a scattering time, and were poet of all our cities,
    Have for all your clever difference quietly left us,
    As we might have known that you would, by that common door.

    The last two stanzas always get me. Wilbur exited “by that common door” in late 2017. I saw his gravestone waiting on a plinth in a memorial yard in Amherst, Massachusetts a year or so later, having just arranged for my mother’s stone from the same yard. The yard was waiting for the snow to clear so that Wilbur’s stone could be transported to the small country cemetery in the hills where he and his wife are buried.

  3. Novelist Evelyn Waugh would later claim that Auden had left “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning.”
    _______

    Waugh was not speaking specifically of Auden there, (“Two Unquiet Lives”) but of the leftwing literary gang who rose to prominence in the late 30s. The article is specifically about Stephen Spender, though Auden and Isherwood are also cited.

    It is really a great takedown of Spender. (The 1st half is, the 2nd half being about another book.)

  4. Just yesterday received some old family photos. One of a newly enlisted happy teen-aged Marine.
    Another photo of same Marine with his mom and dad and brother two years later after combat is an entirely different person. Like thousands of others who fought in the Pacific, he had a Purple Heart and a few other medals .Attempting to smile like the rest, but a noticeable hardness and seriousness.
    He ended up very successful and normal. As a child I asked him what it was like in the war.He simply said: “War is Hell”.And, he meant it.

  5. I just returned from a trip where, against the colorful beauty of old world Medieval architecture, I saw the zeppelin airfield (the ruins of the famous Parade Grounds from Hitler’s Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s ground-breaking 1934 propaganda documentary, and Courtroom 600 in the Nuremburg Palace of Justice, and, most poignantly, the Terazin Jewish concentration camp in the Czech Republic. The evil lurks in those places still, a black pall. The banal, utilitarian brutishness of Terazin made me quietly furious as we heard the backstory of the procedures of this miserable place, and the implacably diabolical outcomes.

  6. I apologize for intruding again. A good friend of mine is a neurosurgeon who was born to Jewish parents on September 1, 1939 in Poland. His parents made it out to France and survived the war along with two more children, one of whom is also a neurosurgeon. They eventually made it to the US. I did not ask them how. The older brother trained at U of Michigan, which has an excellent program. The younger trained at Johns Hopkins. When the older brother was in the USAF, he was the neurosurgeon for all US forces in Europe. He decided that he wanted to see his birthplace in Poland even though it was the height of the Cold War (1972). He traveled to Austria and told a US consular officer that he was a student and had lost his passport. He got a new civilian passport and traveled to Poland where saw his birthplace. At the time he was a Lt Colonel in the USAF so it was a huge risk. Still he got away with it. Quite a guy. And a superb neurosurgeon.

  7. And yet…Spender DID stay in Britain and joined—IIRC—the volunteer fire brigade in London during the war.
    So he WAS in the thick of it… (He also married, which may well have been his own personal version of “Good-Bye to All That”…)
    Meanwhile, Auden and Isherwood made THEIR choices….
    …but since Auden is a giant, should he be cut some slack?

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